Two years ago, when we started with development of Joomla! based websites for our clients, we needed a reliable and simple for use gallery. But, all existing galleries extensions didn’t meet our expectations, so we decided we should create one for ourselves. Initially we created a small content plugin, names Admiror Gallery, that takes images from a folder and displays them on the site in a form of a gallery.Because we are supporters of free & open source software philosophy, and a possibility that other Joomla! developers could find it useful, we decided to contribute and share it with Joomla! community as noncommercial, free & open source project.

Reactions from Jooma! community exceeded our expectations. Just a few days after the Admiror Gallery was published on Joomla! Extensions website, we received a great number of excellent reviews and positive criticism from other developers.

Project Development

We were very excited that a piece of software, created by us, was used by more that thousands of developers around the world. Great number of emails and reviews we received on Joomla! Extensions website made us realize that our work is largely appreciated. Initial success of Admiror Gallery motivated us to improve it and implement features most users requested. After 2 months we create Admiror Gallery component that provided administrator tools, themes manager, images manager, adding of multilingual image captions...

The biggest upgrade of Admiror Gallery was development of Admiror Gallery API, a toolbox for website developers. This transformed Admiror Gallery component to a platform enabling rapid integration of any web based gallery system, even HTML5, Flash or Silverlight galleries, into Joomla! based website.

Gallery had gained huge popularity in a short time and became one of the most popular and top rated galleries for Joomla! .

Interesting thing happened with official Admiror Gallery homepage, it unexpectedly stopped responding. We got worried and started investigating what happened, only to find out that editors of Smashing Magazin, magazine for professional Web designers and developers, published a recommendation for Admiror Gallery on their Twitter and Facebook profiles. This was huge for Admiror Gallery popularity and acceptance , but too huge for our monthly bandwidth

Developing this project improved our development skill as well. Admiror Gallery project was a great platform for learning and gaining experience. Admiror Gallery learned us that it’s not enough only to have an idea and some programming skills. There are many other challenges as well, especially with project of larger complexity, as this project has become.

One of the most important challenge, which we faced, were establishing a good communication with end-users. This is essential for project success, especially with development of Joomla! extensions. It’s impossible to predict which extensions developers use on their websites, or how some extensions interact with each other. Stability of Admiror Gallery is achieved only thanks to good communication with developers and end-users.

A good communication between developers in a team is also very important. Through our mistakes we learn our lessons, started with administration, implementation procedures and SVN. Note for every developer, always use a Version Control Software, SVN, CVS, GIT, which one you choose doesn’t matter, it is important that you use it.

We started Admiror Joomla! Community forum, almost year ago, in effort to engage our users to support and develop Admiror Gallery. Making a forum for Community and it’s maintenance was a big task, but this was a good idea, because users were engaged in providing a technical support, translating component labels to other languages, developing new gallery themes, making tutorials, brainstorming and much more. This is really important for the future of this project and we are grateful to every Community member for their efforts. Admiror Joomla! Community has over 600 members today and keeps growing.

Project Future

During the development, we learned that big and long lasting projects must be commercial in some form, especially if developers are family people, with kids and various financial responsibilities. We have a lot less time for working on noncommercial projects, so development of Admiror Gallery almost stopped in favor of commercial project. That was a reality check for us and not one we like.

We had a second thoughts about development of commercial version of gallery, but it would be in conflict with our wishes to make this project for everyone to use, for us all.

We believe a fundraising campaign for Admiror Gallery next release is the best chance for providing a future for this project. We are ready to create the best possible system for image galleries for Joomla! websites. We have some fabulous ideas and need Your support to achieve them.

Here is what we plan to develop:

01. Native support for Joomla 2.5 and higher.

02. Migration of albums and caption to database, all physical images placed in single folder. This will enable instancing single image resource in more albums and resolving permission issues.

03. Making Album Profiles system, instead inline params. This is important for easy control over Albums look&feel in Menu and Articles systems.

Awesome !!!I’ve used this extension in many websites. It works great, was easy to install. It’s very simple looking without unnecessary decoration and doesn’t display any additional information (copyrights etc.) but I feet if it has a module it will be great for me and many others.Thankyou so much.

Finally!It seems like it took forever to find a gallery that worked for me and that was attractive and easy to use too. I love this gallery extension and definitely recommend it.

A really great gallery pluginThis is a very nice plugin for creating galleries. I was looking for a component that could be used for a portfolio but was having trouble finding a good extension. I decided to look in the gallery section and came across this handy little but powerful pugin. Thanks go out to the developer for a great FREE plugin that works well.

Simple, easy and reliableI've used this extension for an online art gallery. It works great, was easy to install and adjust. It's very simple looking without unnecessary decoration and doesn't display any additional information (copyrights etc.)Thanks a lot to the developers!

The best gallery!!!Better than a lot of commercial galleries.This gallery have exactly everything what you need. For beginners and advanced users even for commercial usage.Fast, easy for use, translated to lot of languages... No credit block...Thanks developers for this fantastic NON-COMMERCIAL plugin!!!

To good to be free!I can not believe this is a free component!Not only is the component flexible, well designed and thought out, extremely easy to use, the support is better than many commercial components offer.I have used almost every gallery component out there and if you are looking for a gallery component I would highly recommend the Admiror Gallery component. You will not be let down.Only one request for the designers, add a donation button to your site! You deserve it.

_________________Help Admiror Gallery become even better, give us a review on JED

Despite being flat broke I have just donated $50 to you guys. You totally deserve it and I hope this small amount helps - even if it just buys a round of beers!

I'd love to have given more but funds don't allow (this went on a credit card as it is!). But actually, I hope my continued help here on the forum and with bug testing etc gives you as much help as the money!

Everyone else on this forum who uses AG/AC/AF - pull your fingers out and get supporting. $10 each would see the target reached. $20 each would guarantee it. $50 each would make things cosy!

Developers, so me and Kekeljevic. Also donations go into hosting budget that keeps this forum and main webpage of Admiror Gallery alive So far, not many people donated, but that is probably because we cannot accept PayPal donations.If we had more donation, or even some steady monthly income we could invest in component development, for example post a challange to develop responcive template for Admiror Gallery, and stuff like that.

Both of us, have full time jobs so donations would help us to pay people to help with Admiror Gallery development.

_________________Help Admiror Gallery become even better, give us a review on JED

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This is the official Admiror Joomla! Community Forum. You are welcome to join the Admiror Joomla! Community. All Admiror Joomla! Extensions Users, Joomla! Developers, PHP or mySQL Developers are welcome to support & contribute to Admiror Joomla! Projects.

Joomla! is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. With a vibrant volunteer community, user-friendly features and plenty of power, Joomla is perfect for your website!

Joomla! is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software patterns, stores data in a MySQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.